With a sunny windowsill or a tabletop with artificial plant lights, anyone can grow an indoor herb garden. An attractive arrangement of potted herbs can give apartment dwellers and others who do not have a plot of ground to grow herbs outdoors a chance to enjoy fresh herbs for cooking, teas, crafts or medicinal use. Even people with large gardens can find good reasons to grow an indoor herb garden, too.

Get Fresh Herbs all Winter

Dried herbs are fine for winter comfort food like soups and stews. Other recipes simply must have fresh herbs. Grow an indoor herb garden, and the summer delights of fresh basil pesto, zesty cilantro-lime chicken or tabbouleh loaded down with fresh parsley can be year-round treats. Even herbs like tarragon and rosemary, which retain their flavor quality fine when dried, are even better added to recipes fresh.

Freshen Indoor Air Naturally

Aromatic herbs like marjoram, sage and thyme don’t just taste great. They smell great as they grow. An indoor herb garden full of these just might replace your commercial air freshener products. A bowl of lavender potpourri may look decorative, but can’t hold a soy-based candle to an attractive ceramic pot with a living lavender plant with scalloped, grey-green foliage and spikes of purple flowers. As it grows, an indoor herb garden full of leafy, aromatic herbs converts the stale carbon dioxide in the indoor air to fresh oxygen.

Expand Your Herb Garden Options

An indoor herb garden lets you grow herbs you can’t grow outdoors, because of climate or a shaded yard. Tropical herbs like stevia and ginger thrive as houseplants. The controlled climate keeps herbs like cilantro from going to seed, which changes the flavor of the leaf. Some herbs that are annual plants in an outdoor garden, requiring replanting every year, will last for years when grown in an indoor herb garden. Herbs like parsley, marjoram and scented geranium are actually perennial plants that are native to warmer climates. They do not complete their life cycle in one year, as a true annual herb does, but rather get killed off by low temperatures during the winter.

Jump Start the Outdoor Herb Garden

When the weather warms up in the spring, you can move the herb garden outdoors. Either keep the herbs in their pots, arranged neatly or sunk up to their rims, or transplant them into the soil for an instant, full sized garden while neighbors are still sprouting seedlings. At the end of the season, you can lift the perennial herbs again and bring them inside.